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To: Mr M P Searle <csubl@csv.warwick.ac.uk>
cc: questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: String space limit? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 26 Oct 1996 20:02:18 BST."
             <840.199610261902@zander.csv.warwick.ac.uk> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 23:48:18 -0700
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>I've been adding a lot of stuff to my X start up script, and I've strted
> getting 'cat: No such process' errors, followed by '/kernel: execve: failed
> to allocate string space'. The cat: errors are from a shell script called
> several times at startup and occasionally later. The script seems to work
> later on - I must be running out of some temporary resource, but my shell
> limits all seem OK and I've set maxusers 30 (I'm not sure exactly how many
> processes that is, but I've had over 100.)
>
>So what eactly am I running out of, and how can I get rid of the errors?

   You should always mention which version of FreeBSD the problem pertains
to. The failure you're seeing is caused by more than 16 processes trying
to exec simultaneously and running out of a kernel resource because of it.
This failure case was eliminated in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (by adding code to block
the process until the resource becomes available), so I would guess that
you're using FreeBSD 2.1.0 or earlier.

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project